There’s a really handly little development board called ESP8266 which is able to run Arduino code. My current home automation dashboard is pimatic (yes, lowercase p), and a community member from the pimatic forums koffienl created a project called ESPimatic which makes is (relatively) easy to use the ESP8266 board to interact with pimatic. You can connect various sensors, e.g. DHT22, DS18B20, etc. by wires to the ESP8266, which will connect by WiFi to your home router, and send the sensor information wirelessly to pimatic dashboard.
There’s a way to allow your Pi to provide as much power to the connected USB devices as possible. Let me show you how.
When using the Dataplicity service, you get logged into their default user ‘dataplicity’. You need to su into your regular user, usually ‘pi’. To make this more convenient (also less secure, so please consider yourself warned!) you can create a sudoers config to allow sudo-ing without a password, and then invoking a shell as the pi user from dataplicity user, without a password.
In case our router doesn’t have a DHCP server (unlikely) or it doesn’t support binding IP addresses to MAC addresses so we always get the same IP for our Pi (possible), we need to set a static IP on the Pi. That way we can make sure the Pi will be reachable on the same IP even across router reboots.
Let’s see what to do to utilize the HY28B as a screen for our Pi. This time I haven’t connected the “touch” part of the display, so now I can only use it as a 2.8 inch screen, but I will go forward, and set up the touch functions later on.
Currently there are two Raspberry Pi types which come with built-i WiFi modules: the Raspberry Pi 3 and the Raspberry Pi Zero W.
If you don’t have a display to connect the Pi to set it up, or you’ve ordered a Pi Zero W without the mini-HDMI adapter, HDMI cable and USB OTG cable for an USB keyboard, you can still use your Pi’s built in Wifi to connect to your home WiFi router, and reach the Zero W via SSH, using the IP address the router has assigned to it via DHCP.
I needed to check the download speed on of an interface on my Raspberry Pi, so I have used a tool called speedometer to do so.
Xiaomi MiFlora is a cost-effective plant sensor, which uses Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) to communicate wirelessly, and is capable of sensing temperature, soil humidity, light, soil fertility and it’s own battery level.
Daniel Matuschek (openha) and other contributors have written a library for the device, and his python code is capable of reading the sensor’s data on Linux. I have been running it on Raspbian Lite operating system, on my Raspberry Pi 3 and also have tested it on my Raspberry Pi Zero W (both devices have onboard Wifi and Bluetooth, no dongles needed).
This one-liner checks the current sum of download speed of all torrents currently running in transmission-daemon. You can also direct the output to a file, to have a logfile of it.
There’s a feature in most modern BIOSes, which makes it possible to power on a PC if a certain “magic packet” is received on the physical (MAC) address of the PC’s LAN network card.
The RTL8188eu WiFi chip is not supported in Raspbian Lite out of the box, so we need a few things to make it work, but I’ll show you how.
I have a set of SilverCrest IP20 remote controlled sockets purchased in LIDL.
Remote: SilverCrest 113854 RCT DS1 AAA-A 3726
4x Switches: SilverCrest 113854 RCR DS1 3711-A IP20 FR 3726
These work on 433Mhz radio frequency, so the switches can be controlled using my Raspberry Pi instead of the remote control which came with the set.
I got an ad-supported version Kindle 4 as a gift, but the ads bothered me, so I’ll show how to remove them.
Home automation projects often there is a need to measure the temperature and humidity of the air. This can be done with e.g. the DHT11 or the more advanced DHT22 sensors.
The AM2302 is a wired version of the DHT22, in a large plastic body. There is a 5.1K resistor inside the sensor connecting VCC and DATA so you do not need any additional pullup resistors. Here’s how to make it work.
In one of the previous posts I have shown how to control the socket’s with pilight and an RF transmitter.
Since the pilight protocol which will be able to control my outlets (quigg_gt9000) is not finished yet, I wrote a simple command which sniffs out the raw codes (with pilight-debug) and a bash script to use send these raw codes to control the outlets (with pilight-send).
At the time of writing this post, the newest device in the Raspberry Pi universe was Pi 3, released on 29th February 2016, boasting a 64bit CPU, an onboard Bluetooth chip, and last but not least: onboard WiFi.
We’ll focus on how to set up WiFi in this post.
I use my NFS file sharing server to stream media to Kodi media centers installed on various devices in my local network.
Downloading (legal) content using torrents is very convenient, but if you plan to “seed” back the stuff, then you’ll need to keep your computer running 24/7 which won’t be good for your electricity bills. For this reason it’s a nice idea to use a Raspberry Pi as a “torrent server” a.k.a “seedbox” which will run day and night, as it’s power consumption is tiny compared to a laptop, let alone a desktop PC.
We’ll be using Transmission as a torrent client, which can be installed as a “daemon” running in the background all the time on the Raspberry Pi.
Check out my custom MOTD on my Raspberry Pi, it’s showing useful data about the system right after I log in.
The Raspberry Pi is a cheap, little credit-card sized computer, which can be used for a myriad of projects. I’ll show you how to get it up and running, including the necessary peripherials. This guide is aimed on how to set up the Raspberry Pi 2 and 3 with wired ethernet connection.